Read this book !

If you love history, if you are curious about the course American Christianity has taken over the centuries, if you love good solid historical, biographical writing, read this book. The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.

Henry Ward Beecher's career as pastor stretched from strict Calvinist roots to a expansive liberal feel good theology. Along the way you get scandal, indulgence, family, New York, the frontier, politics, slavery, the Civil War. Beecher is one of the most fascinating Americans I have read about. He was as the title says the most famous man in America for a long while yet is almost forgotten. His sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom fame.

A great book.

Also Beecher, Illinois where my Lutheran great grandfather was pastor was named after him. How about that?


Here is what Publisher's Weekly said about the book:

Now nearly forgotten, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was an immensely famous minister, abolitionist and public intellectual whose career was rocked by allegations of adultery that made nationwide headlines. In this engaging biography, American studies scholar Applegate situates this curiously modern 19th-century figure at the focus of epochal developments in American culture. Beecher's mesmerizing oratory and fiery newspaper columns made him one of the first celebrities of the nascent mass media. His antislavery politics, though often tepid and vacillating, Applegate argues, injected a note of emotionalism into the debate that—with his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—galvanized Northern public opinion. And by preaching a loving God instead of a wrathful one, the author contends, Beecher repudiated the dour Calvinism of his youth and made happiness and self-fulfillment, rather than sin and guilt, the centerpiece of modern Christian ideology. (The implicit moral anarchy of his creed, critics charged, evinced itself in his sexual indiscretions.) Although marred by occasionally facile psychoanalysis (Applegate describes Beecher, the seventh of 12 siblings, as a classic "middle child" personality), this assessment of Beecher is judicious and critical. Applegate gives an insightful account of a contradictory, fascinating, rather Clintonesque figure who, in many ways, was America's first liberal.

Rich, poor, rich bellies, and crazy saints

Luther on being rich or poor.

Then, too, a man is called "rich" in Scripture, even though he does not have any money or property, if he scrambles and scratches for them and can never get enough of them. These are the very ones whom the Gospel calls "rich bellies," who in the midst of great wealth have the very least and are never satisfied with what God grants them. That is so because the Gospel looks into the heart, which is crammed full of money and property, and evaluates on the basis of this, though there may be nothing in the wallet or the treasury.

On the other hand, it also calls a man "poor" according to the condition of his heart, though he may have his treasury, house, and hearth full. Thus the Christian faith goes straight ahead. It looks at neither poverty nor riches, but only at the condition of the heart. If there is a greedy belly there, the man is called "spiritually rich"; on the other hand, he is called "spiritually poor" if he does not depend upon these things and can empty his heart of them. As Christ says elsewhere (Matt. 19 :29) : "He who forsakes houses, land, children, or wife, will receive a hundredfold, and besides he will inherit eternal life." By this He seeks to rescue their hearts from regarding property as their treasure, and to comfort His own who must forsake it; even in this life they will receive more than they leave behind.

We are not to run away from property, house, home, wife, and children, wandering around the countryside as a burden to other people. This is what the Anabaptist sect does, and they accuse us of not preaching the Gospel rightly because we keep house and home and stay with wife and children, No, He does not want such crazy saints!

This is what it means: In our heart we should be able to leave house and home, wife and children. Even though we continue to live among them, eating with them and serving them out of love, as God has commanded, still we should be able, if necessary, to give them up at any time for God's sake. If you are able to do this, you have forsaken everything, in the sense that your heart is not taken captive but remains pure of greed and of dependence, trust, and confidence in anything. A rich man may properly be called "spiritually poor" without discarding his possessions. But when the necessity arises, then let him do so in God's name, not because he would like to get away from wife and children, house and home, but because, as long as God wills it, he would rather keep them and serve Him thereby, yet is also willing to let Him take them back.

So you see what it means to be "poor" spiritually and before God, to have nothing spiritually and to forsake everything. Now look at the promise which Christ appends when He says, "For of such is the kingdom of heaven." This is certainly a great, wonderful, and glorious promise. Because we are willing to be poor here and pay no attention to temporal goods, we are to have a beautiful, glorious, great, and eternal possession in heaven. And because you have given up a crumb, which you still may use as long and as much as you can have it, you are to receive a crown, to be a citizen and a lord in heaven. This would stir us if we really wanted to be Christians and if we believed that His words are true. But no one cares who is saying this, much less what He is saying. They let it go in one ear and out the other, so that no one troubles himself about it or takes it to heart.

From Luther's commentary on the Sermonon the Mount, Vol. 21, p.15.

A Fascinating LCMS Discussion

A fascinating discussion on the LCMS is going on here at the ALPB Forum site. It is a discussion of the just completed LCMS convention but it is touching on many aspects of LCMS church life. Many notables are participating, district presidents, seminary faculty, CPH big wigs, disaffected clergy who have left the LCMS, ordinary centrist LCMS-ers.

It is great reading.

BTW, ALPB stand for American Lutheran Publicity Bureau

Good advice for church conventions

This is the season for church conventions. Here is some good advice from Ambrose concerning speaking. So read on before you jump to that mike to denounce the latest shenanigans from the chair.


If any one takes heed to this, he will be mild, gentle, modest. For in guarding his mouth, and restraining his tongue, and in not speaking before examining, pondering, and weighing his words—as to whether this should be said, that should be answered, or whether it be a suitable time for this remark—he certainly is practising modesty, gentleness, patience. So he will not burst out into speech through displeasure or anger, nor give sign of any passion in his words, nor proclaim that the flames of lust are burning in his language, or that the incentives of wrath are present in what he says. Let him act thus for fear that his words, which ought to grace his inner life, should at the last plainly show and prove that there is some vice in his morals.

Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy, 4.

Our little blip of green

This is a map of the distribution of LCMS members in the US. LCMS=Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. I am a pastor in that church body.

See that little darker green blip in the sea of pale in North Carolina? That is Catawba County where I am a pastor. Redeemer Lutheran Church, Catawba. For interesting historical reasons (Pennsylvania Dutch migration in the 1700's down the Blue Ridge mountain wagon train) this area has a dense conglomeration of Lutherans.

Just thought you'd like the map. You can look at it in a larger format here.
This is the site where the image came from.

Another Dark Age?

In a dangerous culture and context, the church must become two things: fiercely "conservative" and fiercely rescue minded. The church must hold on with all her might to what has been delivered to her from apostles and prophets. In a dangerous context those gifts are easily surrendered or lost. On the other hand, the church must extend its arms into the danger to pluck the dying into the ark of salvation.

This excerpt from Ian Brdaley's book, The Celtic Way (Darton Longman & Todd Ltd; 2004)says something similar. I ran across the quote from the latest issue of the Forum Letter published by ALPB.



It is not, I think, being unduly pessimistic to suggest that we are entering another Dark Age. The threat now comes, not from savage tribes like the Vandals, Goths, and Huns, but from the brutalising pressures of advertising and the mass media, the crudeness and violence of much popular music and entertainment, and the inexorable rise of the consumer society, with its rampant acquisitiveness and selfishness.

If the churches are to make any kind of effective stand for the Christian values which are increasingly under attack, it is surely by following the example of the Celtic monasteries and becoming little pools of gentleness and enlightenment, oases of compassion and charity in the ever extending desert of secular materialism.

This will not be an easy calling. It will mean modern Christians becoming like the Celtic monks and pilgrims, never feeling quite at home or at rest in this world, ever seeking their place of resurrection and constantly invoking God's presence and protection against evil forces. But we will also have much to help us on our way: the inspiration of music, art, and poetry, the refreshment of nature, and the companionship not just of fellow pilgrims among the living, but also the whole host of heaven, that great company who have already traveled the way before us.

The marriage of doctrine and worship

In the latest issue, in a best of section, Logia was nice enough to reprint a review article I published some years ago in the Logia forum. It was a review of Friederich Kalb's Theology of Worship in Seventeenth-Century Lutheranism (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965; Translated by Henry P. Hamann ).

Here are the first few lines. to read it all ... subscribe to Logia!


The marriage of doctrine and worship is the fruitful union from which a healthy Lutheran church body takes its birth. The Lutheran Confessions supply that doctrine; they serve as the critical pattern of truth drawn from and filled with Scriptural, Christological, Gospel content. But the Confessions in isolation become mere historical documents. They need liturgy the church at worship -in order to truly live in a church body. The Confessions are not static documents but a living guide to Christ, marking the boundaries of truth where Christ and his salvation are found.

Worship is that pasture whose fences are the Confessions. In the Divine Service the faithful feed on God's Truth Incarnate for salvation; the God of grace and mercy works righteousness in dead sinners and his people acclaim him. What the Confessions guarantee, the service delivers: God and his salvation.

That these two go together, worship and doctrine, is not always obvious in the life of the what claims to be confessional Lutheranism in America. Aberrations of church growth methodologies and claustrophobic conservatism centered on repristinating bygone eras both cut the natural bond between the Confessions and the Divine service. In the former, content and confession are unloosed so that worship gallops free from specific beliefs to entertain the masses, while the latter doctrine serves mainly to preserve the form and patterns of the cherished past. In both confessional Lutheranism is still-born, the product of an unhappy, uneven marriage.

I will be away for awhile

I am attending the LCMS convention in Houston Texas as a pastoral delegate for the next week or so.

Not True Church?

Benedict says churches like the Lutherans are not really the church. They lack the means of salvation.

This doesn't surprise or shock me. Actually it is kind of refreshing. Really has always been the teaching of the Roman church. Rather deal with the facts of the Roman tradition and teaching than wish it away.

My faith does not rest on Benedict's opinion of me or my "ecclesial communion". Rather we look to the Word of Christ. I am sure that the bread I eat on Sunday is his body. I am sure of my baptism. I am sure of His Word. Benedict will come and go. We grieve the divisions in the church and pray for unity. Yet our status as church and Christians does not revolve around a Pope in Rome.

Here is the AP story:

Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.

Benedict approved a document from his old offices at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that restates church teaching on relations with other Christians. It was the second time in a week the pope has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that modernized the church.

On Saturday, Benedict revisited another key aspect of Vatican II by reviving the old Latin Mass. Traditional Catholics cheered the move, but more liberal ones called it a step back from Vatican II.

Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.

In the latest document _ formulated as five questions and answers _ the Vatican seeks to set the record straight on Vatican II's ecumenical intent, saying some contemporary theological interpretation had been "erroneous or ambiguous" and had prompted confusion and doubt.

It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."

In the new document and an accompanying commentary, which were released as the pope vacations here in Italy's Dolomite mountains, the Vatican repeated that position.

"Christ 'established here on earth' only one church," the document said. The other communities "cannot be called 'churches' in the proper sense" because they do not have apostolic succession _ the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ's original apostles.

The Rev. Sara MacVane of the Anglican Centre in Rome, said there was nothing new in the document.

"I don't know what motivated it at this time," she said. "But it's important always to point out that there's the official position and there's the huge amount of friendship and fellowship and worshipping together that goes on at all levels, certainly between Anglican and Catholics and all the other groups and Catholics."

The document said Orthodox churches were indeed "churches" because they have apostolic succession and that they enjoyed "many elements of sanctification and of truth." But it said they lack something because they do not recognize the primacy of the pope _ a defect, or a "wound" that harmed them, it said.

"This is obviously not compatible with the doctrine of primacy which, according to the Catholic faith, is an 'internal constitutive principle' of the very existence of a particular church," the commentary said.

Despite the harsh tone of the document, it stresses that Benedict remains committed to ecumenical dialogue.

"However, if such dialogue is to be truly constructive, it must involve not just the mutual openness of the participants but also fidelity to the identity of the Catholic faith," the commentary said.

The document, signed by the congregation prefect, U.S. Cardinal William Levada, was approved by Benedict on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul _ a major ecumenical feast day.

There was no indication about why the pope felt it necessary to release the document, particularly since his 2000 document summed up the same principles. Some analysts suggested it could be a question of internal church politics, or that it could simply be an indication of Benedict using his office as pope to again stress key doctrinal issues from his time at the congregation.

Hip librarians

S.M. Hutchens has shared his thoughts on librarians trying to be hip. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

His conclusion:

Serious library users have the same opinion of hip librarians as serious church users have of hip priests and ministers.

That is, they do not think much of them at all.

Read the whole thing here

Funny T's

Some funny T-shirts. From threadless.com

Feud over women pastors in finland

Interesting article

Why intellectuals love genocide

This article traces an Australian controversy where a scholar has asserted convincingly that Australia was not founded on a genocide of aboriginal people. Rather than being hailed as a hero, he was roundly condemned. The article asks why this was so.

What struck me at the time about the controversy was the evident fact that a large and influential part of the Australian academy and intelligentsia actually wanted there to have been a genocide. They reacted to Windschuttle’s book like a child who has had a toy snatched from its hand by its elder sibling. You would have thought that a man who discovered that his country had not been founded, as had previously been thought and taught, on genocide would be treated as a national hero. On the contrary, he was held up to execration.


HT: Arts and Letters Daily

Piepkorn on seeker services

AC Pipekorn longtime professor at Concordia Seminary St Louis in the 50's and 60's on seeker services and retaining the full Sunday service. A fair common sense answer, I think, that retains the focus on the sacrament and liturgy while also leaving room for reaching out and extending a hand to those unfamiliar with the service.

HT : Luther at the movies


"In October 1951 a pastor wrote to Piepkorn for help with a paper on the use of the Liturgy for evangelistic purposes that the pastor was preparing for delivery at a pastoral conference. Piepkorn replied:

The subject is interesting and you should be able to do quite a lot with the evangelistic emphasis in the Confession of Sins, the Nicene Creed, the Common Offertories, the General Prayer, the Preface for Advent, Lent and Easter, the Agnus Dei, the Words of Institution and the Aaronic Blessing. At the same time, you ought to give due consideration to the fact that the Liturgy is part of the Church’s private culture and was never designed or intended for evangelistic purposes. The propaganda service of the early Church was the synaxis [the Service of the Word], not the Eucharist. The synaxis consisted almost wholly of lections and instructions—no prayers. In this connection let me commend to your reading Dom Gregory Dix’ The Shape of the Liturgy. My own feeling is that we should not try to make the Liturgy do too much. We should probably do better if we held special services (weekly or monthly, or daily for short periods) for the evangelization of the unchurched. . . .

I have observed that parishes which scaled the Liturgy down in the interest of evangelization (abbreviating it, miscegnating it with "popular" hymns, and eliminating the traditional ceremonial) have never been able to return to a really more adequate worship level. My own experience is that my people and I can do more with pagan and Protestant inquirers in a service designed especially for their needs—strongly educational and evangelistic, as informal as possible without vulgarizing the subject matter, and with plenty of give-and-take (achieved through such means as discussion, panel presentations, audiovisual aids, pulpit dialogue, and a question box). After they have been adequately instructed, then they can be brought into a normal Lutheran service and participate in it with spiritual profit.

(Letter of October 16, 1951 to the Rev. D.)
"At the same time, Piepkorn was 'profoundly skeptical of "informal"' worship services. In November of 1952, he wrote in reply to another pastor:

I am no foe of experimentation; I have done my share in my time, and please God, I shall keep on doing so. I am profoundly grateful for every valuable insight that I have been able to obtain from the experimentation of other people. After eleven years in the military service, during most of which I occupied a supervisory position where I was compelled to be present at literally hundreds of religious services of all denominations, I am profoundly skeptical of "informal” worship. . . .

I have repeatedly insisted that one service a week in our churches is inadequate and that we ought to have a considerable variety of services to meet a variety of needs and, what is ultimately probably more important to accomplish, a variety of functions. Part of the problem, of course, is the size of our parishes. This is only one of many areas where we are paying what seems to me to be too high a price for uneconomically small parochial organizations. At the same time, I believe that each ought as a minimum to offer its membership at least one service a Sunday and other major Holy Days in which the Blessed Sacrament is celebrated according to the order of service prescribed by our Church. If this were done, it would seem to me to be quite within the province of the pastor and the parish to engage in as much legitimate experimentation at other hours as the facilities of the parish permit.

(November 6, 1952 Letter to the Rev. S)

Christus Victor or Substitutionary Atonement

Its not just a academic historical debate.

Christus victor is the idea that on the cross and through the Resurrection Christ won victory over the enemies of humanity.

Penal substitution is the idea that Christ died on the cross to absorb God's wrath; God the Father punished him instead of sinners.

The article reports that evangelicals in England are splitting over which one of these is correct. I resonate with this statement by J.I. Packer:

According to J. I. Packer, British-born board of governors' theologian at Regent College and CT senior editor, various biblical understandings of the atonement need not conflict. Rather, penal substitution, Christus Victor, and other Scriptural views of atonement work together to present a fully orbed picture of Christ's work.

"To omit any part of this story," Packer said, "is to distort and damage the gospel."

I agree. Both are in the Scriptures, both amply supported in the Christian tradition and in Lutheran theology. I find in my preaching there are times to emphasize the one and at other times the other.

I normally do not like both/and solutions to theology but this one fits.

The beauty of the new born man

What a nice baptismal exhortation Gregory of Nyssa writes here in his sermon on Christ's baptism.

Baptism means a new way of life.
Baptism means conflict with the Devil, who is envious of our new position.
Our weapon against the devil is baptism itself.


But do you all, as many as are made glad by the gift of regeneration, and make your boast of that saving renewal, show me, after the sacramental grace, the change in your ways that should follow it, and make known by the purity of your way of life the difference effected by your transformation for the better. For of those things which are before our eyes nothing is altered: the characteristics of the body remain unchanged, and the mold of the visible nature is nowise different.

But there is certainly need of some manifest proof, by which we may recognize the newborn man, discerning by clear tokens the new from the old. And these I think are to be found in the intentional motions of the soul, whereby it separates itself from its old customary life, and enters on a newer way of life, and will clearly teach those acquainted with it that it has become something different from its former self, bearing in it no token by which the old self was recognized. ...

… Therefore, also, it is that after the dignity of adoption the devil plots more vehemently against us, pining away with envious glance, when he beholds the beauty of the new-born man; earnestly tending towards that heavenly city, from which he fell: and he raises up against us fiery temptations, seeking earnestly to despoil us of that second adornment, as he did of our former array.

But when we are aware of his attacks, we ought to repeat to ourselves the apostolic words, " As many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death". Now if we have been conformed to his death, sin henceforth in us is surely a corpse, pierced through by the javelin of baptism, as that fornicator was thrust through by the zealous. Flee therefore from us, ill-omened one! For it is a corpse you seek to despoil, one long ago joined to you, one who long since lost his senses for pleasures. A corpse is not enamored of bodies, a corpse is not captivated by death, a corpse slanders not, a corpse lies not, snatches not at what is not its own, reviles not those who encounter it.

My way of living is regulated for another life: I have learnt to despise the things that are in the world, to pass by the things of earth, to hasten to the things of heaven, even as Paul expressly testifies, that the world is crucified to him, and he to the world. These are the words of a soul truly regenerated: these are the utterances of the newly-baptized man, who remembers his own profession, which he made to God when the sacrament was administered to him, promising that he would despise, for the sake of love towards him, all torment and all pleasure alike.
Thoma Finn, Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate, West and East Syria, 68-69.